I Can Has Cheezburger isn’t the only site trafficking in pictures of cute cats saying and doing cute things. There’s also cuteoverload.com, kittenwar.com, and babyanimalz.com, just to name a few. Still, I Can Has Cheezburger is the first thing that Google belches up when you search “lolcat,” and it houses thousands of user-submitted pictures of cute “kittehs,” hamsters, walruses — any animal, in almost any circumstance, as long as it’s strange, funny, bizarre, or cute enough for users to vote it in and comment on. An average of 8000 submissions are sent in per day (O RLY? YA RLY), according to site administrator Ben Huh. As to the ephemeral appeal of the site itself — visitors go there for the cute pictures, the cheekiness of language, the public opportunity to riff on the validity of the pictures in lolspeak, or any combination of these — Huh says it can’t be pinned down. “The tough part about running the site is providing a daily update of pictures that hits every one of those subgroups,” he says. “What the cats do is provide a non-threatening form of expression of someone’s sense of humor.”
Other zealous lolcat-inspired ventures include LolSecretz (a mash-up of I Can Has Cheezburger and PostSecret, a Web site where users anonymously submit postcards of their deepest, most classified private info) and Lolcatbible, the translation of the entire Holy Testament into “lolspeak.” In the latter, Genesis commences thusly: “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.”
This past week, after a two-day auction, lolcats finally made the official transition from Web to print: Gotham Books bought the rights to publish an I Can Has Cheezburger spin-off tome. Literary agent Kate McKean told Mediabistro’s Galleycat blog that site icon Professor Happycat will “guide the reader through the different memes with brief definitions and context, while still capturing the absurd humor of the site.”
In their most personal writings — such as e-mails or blog posts — lolcat users claim they find a sense of liberation in the language. “A lot of people use our pictures on their blogs, when they’re going on a rant about something,” says Huh. “They’ll post a picture of a lolcat doing something funny that’s related. They usually do that because it cuts the sharpness. ‘Oh, I had a crappy day, my boss really sucks!’ And then they’ll post a picture of Boss Cat, which is, like, ‘Come into My Office!’ ”
But lolcats also have the potential to slice away at the starkness of issues on a much larger scale, from death to globalization to conflicts in the Middle East. Huh recalls one popular posting of a suicidal lolcat, featuring a black background and one tiny white paw sticking up from the page. “Goodbye, cruel world,” was all it said. Then, on the first of the year, I Can Has Cheezburger posted a “Happy Noo Year” image of an Israeli defense solider who, clutching his M-16, was crouching down to pet a kitten sitting at his feet. “We wish you the peace on erf,” the administrators wrote, and the caption on the photo read “No Fite, Just Rubs.” The picture was one of the most popular photos of the day, and has since received 3533 Diggs on digg.com, a user-submitted news-article popularity Web site that also ranks photos. The image ultimately garnered 231 comments on I Can Has Cheezburger before the administrators locked them down so the site could load faster.
“This isn’t what we would call a traditional lolcat,” says Huh of the photo. “This isn’t, ‘Ha ha, this is funny,’ but it did resonate with a lot of people . . . this one was special for us.”
Itty-bitty kitty committee
Lolcats aren’t the only kitties that have managed to generate cultural phenomena. In Japan, Hello Kitty is, quite literally, everywhere. You can clothe yourself in Hello Kitty threads (underwear, outerwear, diamond-encrusted jewelry), douse yourself in Hello Kitty cosmetics, fill your apartment with Hello Kitty décor, cook a Hello Kitty breakfast with Kitty’s head burned in the toast made by your Hello Kitty toaster, withdraw money from your Hello Kitty Consolidated Account at Dah Sing Bank, write inter-office memos on Hello Kitty stationery with an endless series of Hello Kitty pens and pencils, cruise around in your Hello Kitty car, play music on your Hello Kitty stereo, and, on the weekends, spend your free time tooling around Puroland, an indoor theme-park in Tokyo run by Sanrio, the company that owns and licenses Kitty’s image.
If you have the inclination, you can even book a flight on EVA Air’s Hello Kitty jet, a special edition EVA Airbus 330-200 that is “painted nose-to-tail with super-sized characters from the charming world of Hello Kitty.” And that’s not all: flight attendants are decked out in Hello Kitty apparel, in-flight Hello Kitty meals are served, and the inside of the cabin is plastered with Hello Kitty’s image everywhere you turn. Consider Disney’s recent campaigns to expand from a toddler and tween obsession to a lifestyle brand for adults, with wedding dresses, furniture, fashion, and vacations. Sanrio figured out that secret ages ago.